It is easy to forget, that names of places can have non-ASCII characters. As this is a speed contest, I wonder how slow the default library implementation for ordering unicode strings alphabetically is in Java?
Edit: Apparently there is no universal way to order words alphabetically, but it depends on the (human) language in question.
For example, İzmir is in Turkey and in Turkish alphabetical ordering the dotted capital İ comes after the dotless capital I. And in Turkish, Ö comes right after O, but for example in Swedish, the Swedish special letters Å, Ä and Ö are at the very end of the alphabet.
How are you supposed to deal with this in this contest? Are you somehow supposed to know that Özalp is a town in Turkey, and thus comes after O in alphabetical ordering, but Örebro is a town in Sweden and should be ordered to the very end of the alphabetical ordering, after Z and Å and Ä?
https://icu4c-demos.unicode.org/icu-bin/collation.html
but there you first have to select the language from the drop-down menu. So in general, you would first need to know the country where your weather station was located, before you can correctly collate its name.
I don't believe the fastest entries are doing all this(?)
Edit: In the examples [1], the guy writes a Polish city using its English name "Cracow". So you can't choose the alphabetical ordering based on the geographical location of the weather station, but you need to somehow detect in which language its name is written in, in the data.
[1] https://www.morling.dev/blog/one-billion-row-challenge/
Edit2: I guess you could declare that either the "Default Unicode Collation Element Table (DUCET)", or perhaps the American English "en-US-u-va-posix" locale is the correct way to alphabetize.
This post doesn't seem to take that into account.
My friend also claims he is going to try it in Prolog. We'll see :)
https://www.bytesizego.com/blog/one-billion-row-challenge-go
